I've been thinking about the health-care reform bill (hey, I may live Over Here, but I'm still American), and I've got really conflicted feelings about it. On the one hand, insurance-industry reform, enforced by regulators with real power, will save so much pain, so much money, so many lives. On the other hand, a single-payer public-option system could be much easier for the patients to navigate, less expensive when people have preventative care instead of problems compounded by neglect - but that also has to be run by people who believe it can work, and it will be terrible the minute someone with a "government small enough you could drown it in a bathtub" philosophy is in charge.
On the other other hand, watching the party I vote for get totally played by one person who apparently never read the platform, listening to the serious and thoughtful discussions about whether their female constituents' rights matter, do their votes really count anyway, why are they so wrapped up in irrelevant women's issues - I'm disgusted that they are the best I can realistically do for representatives in government.
I was happy to hear that a change to the student-loan structure was also part of the health-care reform bill; though the two don't directly connect in my mind, I've seen enough multi-part bills to know that sometimes this is how it gets done. Making federal student loans direct loans from the government, and putting the interest on them (money that had been no-risk profit for banks) into the Pell grant program sound like a great idea to me. I would like it even better if I knew that the amount of grant and loan money available to students was at least as much as it had been before the previous President started de-funding the programs. I heard an interesting spin on the combination of the two bills on an episode of Rachel Maddow from last week: a member of Congress said that health-care costs and college costs are things that middle-class people really worry about, and he thought it made good sense to address them both at the same time. I think he's got a point, though my quick agreement with him has me feeling a little melancholy. Mostly I'm reminded of a line of Joni Mitchell's, and it's making me feel old:
Caught in the middle, Carol, we're middle class, we're middle-aged...
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
April 6, 2010
January 20, 2010
Admission
I went to the big national (US) conference for people in My Science a couple of weeks ago. Most people will claim that they find this conference very unproductive, because it is so general, but it is an important venue for job interviews and maintaining personal connections. I actually got quite a bit of work done with some far-flung collaborators, made a point of spending time with people whose general good will I will need in the future, and had an all-around fun class-reunion-type experience.
The meeting itself was overwhelmingly large, so I did not go to most of the talks or read most of the posters. This more focused approach still left me dead on my feet at the end of the first day, and the talks and discussions I did attend kept me busy and engaged. The overall experience sparked a couple of post ideas for me, and this is one of them: promoting demographic diversity is very important in My Science, is totally dependent on the good-faith effort of people who are already in the club, and is pretty much doomed in an admissions and promotion system where we are overwhelmed with applicants and starved for time.
The last speaker in a session I went to on mentoring talked about his experiences as a black man from a small college going into a big-time graduate program: outright hostility, awkward social dynamics, undergraduate classes, and a lasting commitment to making that experience better for students who would come later. He's now a professor at Florida State, and had a lot of interesting and practical things to say about making graduate programs attractive and accessible to people with backgrounds like his: rural, few family expectations for college, no lab experience, not white, few demographic role models in the field, and less likely to maintain confidence in the face of setbacks (and the whole game in My Science is psychological: you need to realize that everyone's insecure, even the really clever people, and you can't listen to your self-doubt).
The things he does to make FSU a more diverse place are these:
When I was in grad school, the students had some long conversations on the merits and methods of increasing diversity in My Science. The business-related arguments (that a diversity of backgrounds brings a diversity of problem-solving approaches and perspectives) don't really work in our field: at least from the insider's perspective, there's not much cultural to what we do. The main point, we figured, was justice: why should people gain or lose the opportunity to do science based on what they look like or where they come from?
Being on the graduate admissions committee for a year, it quickly became clear to me that "where you come from" has a lot of effects on where you can go: my institution was very highly ranked as a graduate school for My Science, and as such could be pretty baldly snobby about who was admitted. It didn't matter how good your grades were at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople; we've never heard of them, we don't know the people who wrote your letters of recommendation, so we don't know whether you are prepared to come here and keep up with people who had "good preparation" (read: known quantity) at the right universities as undergraduates. In order to maintain our prestige, we have to admit mostly/only students who we are confident will do well.
This is pretty obviously problematic for people who want to go to grad school to learn things, or to become professional scientists, and not just to boost the status of a particular school by their effortless brilliance. Overall, and this is something I was shocked to realize I hadn't been using as an admissions standard, admissions ought to be about what students can do, not just what they have already done. It's very difficult to evaluate that, and when you have three days to rank 150 applications, it's so easy to start using shorthands (where an applicant went to college, GRE scores, name recognition of their letter-writers). If your department is willing to work on cultivating the students, and not just putting them to work in the data-reduction mines, I don't think it would be that big of a gamble to shake up the admissions process.
The meeting itself was overwhelmingly large, so I did not go to most of the talks or read most of the posters. This more focused approach still left me dead on my feet at the end of the first day, and the talks and discussions I did attend kept me busy and engaged. The overall experience sparked a couple of post ideas for me, and this is one of them: promoting demographic diversity is very important in My Science, is totally dependent on the good-faith effort of people who are already in the club, and is pretty much doomed in an admissions and promotion system where we are overwhelmed with applicants and starved for time.
The last speaker in a session I went to on mentoring talked about his experiences as a black man from a small college going into a big-time graduate program: outright hostility, awkward social dynamics, undergraduate classes, and a lasting commitment to making that experience better for students who would come later. He's now a professor at Florida State, and had a lot of interesting and practical things to say about making graduate programs attractive and accessible to people with backgrounds like his: rural, few family expectations for college, no lab experience, not white, few demographic role models in the field, and less likely to maintain confidence in the face of setbacks (and the whole game in My Science is psychological: you need to realize that everyone's insecure, even the really clever people, and you can't listen to your self-doubt).
The things he does to make FSU a more diverse place are these:
- First, let them in
- Second, allow for remediation without stigma
- Third, make a comfortable department community (peer mentors can make a big difference)
- Fourth, advertise at meetings of minority scientists and at HBCs
- Fifth, involve your undergrads
When I was in grad school, the students had some long conversations on the merits and methods of increasing diversity in My Science. The business-related arguments (that a diversity of backgrounds brings a diversity of problem-solving approaches and perspectives) don't really work in our field: at least from the insider's perspective, there's not much cultural to what we do. The main point, we figured, was justice: why should people gain or lose the opportunity to do science based on what they look like or where they come from?
Being on the graduate admissions committee for a year, it quickly became clear to me that "where you come from" has a lot of effects on where you can go: my institution was very highly ranked as a graduate school for My Science, and as such could be pretty baldly snobby about who was admitted. It didn't matter how good your grades were at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople; we've never heard of them, we don't know the people who wrote your letters of recommendation, so we don't know whether you are prepared to come here and keep up with people who had "good preparation" (read: known quantity) at the right universities as undergraduates. In order to maintain our prestige, we have to admit mostly/only students who we are confident will do well.
This is pretty obviously problematic for people who want to go to grad school to learn things, or to become professional scientists, and not just to boost the status of a particular school by their effortless brilliance. Overall, and this is something I was shocked to realize I hadn't been using as an admissions standard, admissions ought to be about what students can do, not just what they have already done. It's very difficult to evaluate that, and when you have three days to rank 150 applications, it's so easy to start using shorthands (where an applicant went to college, GRE scores, name recognition of their letter-writers). If your department is willing to work on cultivating the students, and not just putting them to work in the data-reduction mines, I don't think it would be that big of a gamble to shake up the admissions process.
November 27, 2009
Conflicted consumerism
I like the concept of Buy Nothing Day; I'm pretty anticonsumerist normally*, and I feel like reporting on Christmas shopping has taken this nasty turn, with stories built completely around companies needing to make half their yearly gross in December, and profits are down from this time last year, and you people need to go spend money or the economy will fall apart and it will be your fault!
This morning, I had failed at BND by 9:30 AM, and spent the next little while enjoying my capitalist-consumerist-traitor chai and wondering if it mattered that much. I'm not in the US, and today is just another Friday here, not the shopping-pocalypse. I'm not making a Statement to the German public if I don't go all out with the Black Friday madness: nobody else here is going shopping at 4 AM either, because that's crazy. Incidentally, you really don't want to take me shopping with a gajillion other people at 4AM. I'm grumpy enough about crowds and shopping when I'm awake.
*I think of this as simple pragmatism, because I don't see any point in trying to join a game I can't really compete in. This is actually a big leap in maturity, and not just foot-stompiness, as previously I didn't see the point in playing a game I couldn't win. If status can be bought, but I'm never going to have enough money to be Important, why play? Why give other people's opinions of me that kind of power? Since the goalposts will always be moving, why sign up for a life of feeling inadequate?
This morning, I had failed at BND by 9:30 AM, and spent the next little while enjoying my capitalist-consumerist-traitor chai and wondering if it mattered that much. I'm not in the US, and today is just another Friday here, not the shopping-pocalypse. I'm not making a Statement to the German public if I don't go all out with the Black Friday madness: nobody else here is going shopping at 4 AM either, because that's crazy. Incidentally, you really don't want to take me shopping with a gajillion other people at 4AM. I'm grumpy enough about crowds and shopping when I'm awake.
*I think of this as simple pragmatism, because I don't see any point in trying to join a game I can't really compete in. This is actually a big leap in maturity, and not just foot-stompiness, as previously I didn't see the point in playing a game I couldn't win. If status can be bought, but I'm never going to have enough money to be Important, why play? Why give other people's opinions of me that kind of power? Since the goalposts will always be moving, why sign up for a life of feeling inadequate?
November 17, 2009
Basically a placeholder
I was listening today to the episode "This American Life" recently devoted to health-care reform, and I got totally hung up on one thing in the last story. It is generally about the negotiations between insurance companies and hospitals, and the reporter and the economists he speaks to assert multiple times that the real problem with the current healthcare system in the US is that patients don't care what procedures cost; that we're all wasting insurance companies' money on unnecessary tests and treatments. Apparently, if we had to pay some fraction of the cost for every procedure, we wouldn't go frivolously having biopsies and taking maintenance medications.
What?
I really don't have time to get into this tonight, but I am writing up some thoughts (including every Professional Scientist's favorite complaint, that a test that returns a negative result is not a waste of time, it is still valid data) and will say more another day. This is an area where I have a hard time staying removed from the issue: it feels so personal and immediate, what if I was in that situation?
What?
I really don't have time to get into this tonight, but I am writing up some thoughts (including every Professional Scientist's favorite complaint, that a test that returns a negative result is not a waste of time, it is still valid data) and will say more another day. This is an area where I have a hard time staying removed from the issue: it feels so personal and immediate, what if I was in that situation?
November 5, 2009
What do I read?
My online reading habits drift, partly as I find new sites I like, and partly because I'm one of those people who gets overwhelmed by bad news. I used to read some of the big-name feminist blogs (Feministe, Feministing, Pandagon) all the time, but stopped when it started to get me down that they were all reporting the same frustrating, sad stories. I'm at about that place with Shakesville, which is a real shame because the community there is very tightly knit, but the focus of the site is maybe too honest for me. A frank look at the world, from the perspective that people deserve to be treated fairly, gets to be too much when society refuses to play by the rules. I have picked up good habits from reading there, and at Shapely Prose - I can't even read the body-snarking comments at Project Rungay or the "I'm so fat" contests in some of the Jezebel threads, because they're so obviously wrong after just a little time in body-shame-free environments.
I can be a real news junkie at times - I was completely addicted to 538 in the month before the last presidential election, and the level of detail in FireDogLake's coverage of congressional hearings and debates is a great antidote for me to the hopeless superficiality of TV news. Lately, though, I'm getting that feeling again, where opening up a lefty news aggregator like Crooks & Liars creates this heavy feeling in my chest, where I wonder what's gone wrong since the last time I checked the US news.
Fortunately, news isn't the only thing on the internet: although I do research in physical science, I like to read about literature, history and philosophy. Maybe I'm making up for the time I didn't spend learning those things in college? Edge of the American West and Crooked Timber discuss a lot of subjects I don't know a lot about, usually with a good amount of backstory and nuance, and while I don't know what Michael Berube is talking about in his "Theory Thursday" posts, the thread about the Golden Compass series gave me a sci-fi/religious philosophy reading list that would take months to get through. I also used to read Language Log regularly, but quit when the "grumpy old man who doesn't allow comments on his posts" contributor started getting more airtime than the computational linguists.
I also read very little about my field, or those related to it, online. I don't think the blog environment works well for real science education: there isn't the time, or the possibility of real-time interaction, that make science education work. The surface-skimming of popular science reporting grates on me a bit, too: when I write for and read journals, it is with great care and precision, and blog-format writing doesn't have the time for all that. For me, the details are the interesting bits. There is also a little professional jealousy in action here, I should admit, because my subfield is only a little bit cool, and doesn't get the kind of attention or money that follow the sexier specialties.
I can be a real news junkie at times - I was completely addicted to 538 in the month before the last presidential election, and the level of detail in FireDogLake's coverage of congressional hearings and debates is a great antidote for me to the hopeless superficiality of TV news. Lately, though, I'm getting that feeling again, where opening up a lefty news aggregator like Crooks & Liars creates this heavy feeling in my chest, where I wonder what's gone wrong since the last time I checked the US news.
Fortunately, news isn't the only thing on the internet: although I do research in physical science, I like to read about literature, history and philosophy. Maybe I'm making up for the time I didn't spend learning those things in college? Edge of the American West and Crooked Timber discuss a lot of subjects I don't know a lot about, usually with a good amount of backstory and nuance, and while I don't know what Michael Berube is talking about in his "Theory Thursday" posts, the thread about the Golden Compass series gave me a sci-fi/religious philosophy reading list that would take months to get through. I also used to read Language Log regularly, but quit when the "grumpy old man who doesn't allow comments on his posts" contributor started getting more airtime than the computational linguists.
I also read very little about my field, or those related to it, online. I don't think the blog environment works well for real science education: there isn't the time, or the possibility of real-time interaction, that make science education work. The surface-skimming of popular science reporting grates on me a bit, too: when I write for and read journals, it is with great care and precision, and blog-format writing doesn't have the time for all that. For me, the details are the interesting bits. There is also a little professional jealousy in action here, I should admit, because my subfield is only a little bit cool, and doesn't get the kind of attention or money that follow the sexier specialties.
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